Punitive Heterotopia in Ann Turner’s Celia (1988)

Ann Turner's 1988 film Celia is set amongst the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s during the "Red scare" of the Menzies administration. When 9-year-old Celia's grandma dies, Celia finds emotional solace in the company of her next door neighbours, the Tanners. Celia's conservative father, Ray, attends to stop his daughter from associating with the communist-sympathising Tanners through the gift of a rabbit. In the 1950s attempts to cull Australia's "rabbit plague" involved the widespread banning of rabbits as household pets. When Celia's pet rabbit is taken from her she seeks retribution against the forces of patriarchal domination in her life, including her father and uncle. This retribution involves stylised magick rituals, staged judicial "performances" and acts of direct violence. This paper argues, after Foucault, that, divested of political power as a girl and a child, Celia establishes a phantastical heterotopia that sits radically outside of the hegemonic power structures of conservative Australia. This opens a radical potential for a judicial approach that reflects a child's experiential understanding of the world. Tragically Celia's imitation modelling ensures her replication of the retributive model of punishment of her adult milieu (both in its treatment of communists and rabbits), albeit with a degree of public spectacle repressed by the private space of the adult penal system. More optimistically, Celia's stagings also contain elements of restorative justice. The paper concludes with a consideration of how a penal model based upon restorative justice for under 18s would better serve children's development and rehabilitation

Wisdom and Folly in the city: exploring urban contexts in the book of Proverbs

AbstractProverbs 1–9 is often said to have a city background that contrasts with the agricultural imagery dominant in the maxims sections. However, this is an oversimplification. There are also maxims in the main Proverbs collection that concern the city, and the city background revealed within Proverbs 1–9 links up with the portrayal of the ‘capable wife’ in Proverbs 31:10–33. Having established the presence of city references throughout Proverbs, this article explores how the portrayal of Woman Wisdom and Woman Folly in particular gives fascinating insight into the heart of happenings in the Israelite city

Spiritual formation and the nurturing of creative spirituality : a case study in Proverbs

The article is positioned in the interface between Old Testament scholarship and the discipline of spiritual direction of which spiritual formation is a component. The contribution that a Ricoeurian hermeneutic may make in unlocking the potential which an imaginal engagement with the book of Proverbs may hold for the discipline of spiritual formation was explored. Specifically three aspects of the text of Proverbs illustrated the creative process at work in the text, and how it converges with the concept of spiritual formation and the nurturing of creative spirituality. These aspects were, the development in Lady Wisdom’s discourses, the functional definition of the fear of Yahweh (illustrated from Proverbs 10:1–15:33), and the paradigmatic character of the book of Proverbs. INTRADISCIPLINARY AND/OR INTERDISCIPLINARY IMPLICATIONS : The research is positioned in the interface between Old Testament studies and Practical Theology. The research results in the enhancement of the interdisciplinary dialogue and interchange of resources between the named disciplines with regard to the interest in formation of persons that the biblical book of Proverbs and the discipline of spiritual formation shares.http://www.ve.org.zaam2016Old Testament Studie

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Objectifying Visual Language in Autobiographical Comics

Critiques of the objectification of female characters in comics have often focused upon depictions within the superhero genre (cf. Avery-Natale 2013; Cocca 2014; Nelson 2015). Such arguments adopt the framework of Laura Mulvey's ‘Male Gaze’ (1975) to assess the costuming, physical physique, and narrative role given to such characters. In one comment on similar controversies, Neil Cohn (2014) has argued for a greater emphasis upon the visual language used in objectifying depictions that does not get caught up in debates over realism since, he argues, comics are unconcerned with reality. Autobiographical comics, however, now form a significant part of the comics market and scholarship (cf. Schlichting and Schmid 2019). A tension exists between the rhetorical mode of visual metaphor exploited by comics (cf. Venkatesan and Saji 2021) and the appeal to authenticity made by non-fiction (cf. El Refaie 2012). Focusing on autobiographical comics – here, some published between 1991 and 2018 – allows us to assess how sexual objectification operates within comics without the issue being clouded by irresolvable appeals to reality in the fundamentally escapist/ fantastic superhero genre. The visual language in the comics by Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and David Heatley has been criticized for reducing the ‘other’ to a series of more stagnant, occluded, and restrictive graphic patterns than afforded to their author surrogates. Ariel Schrag's work, meanwhile, points towards possible means of avoiding such tendencies in future autobiographical comics.</jats:p